In the past soft contact lenses have been packaged in sterile water or saline solution usually in glass bottles with rubber stoppers and foil seals to hold the stoppers in place on the bottle. Such bottled contact lenses can be easily sterilized because the bottles can be stacked in an autoclave. It is not recommended to sterilize soft contact lenses with radiation because the radiation energy affects the material from which the soft contact lenses are made.
A new package for a soft contact lens is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,691,820 and assigned to the Assignee of the present invention. This new package has a plastic base with a recess for holding a soft lens in saline solution. The package is sealed with a removable liquid impermeable laminated sheet. It would be desirable to have a container which could be used to hold a number of individually packaged contact lenses during sterilization then to merely close the container after sterilization and use the same container for shipping and storage of the individually packaged contact lenses. It would also be desirable to have a container which is tamper resistant and which shows evidence of attempts to tamper.
It is also desirable to hold the above-mentioned individual packages for contact lenses while they are being sterilized so that the plastic package does not warp. The warping does not present a serious functional problem, but a warped package would be undesirable from an aesthetic point of view.